Green Groups: Obama Not Doing Enough On Climate

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House has rebuffed repeated protests by some of President Barack Obama's top environmental allies that his climate strategy won't work.

The heads of 18 environmental groups went public recently with a complaint they have privately pressed the White House on for months: Obama's support of expanded oil and gas production doesn't make sense for a president who wants to reduce global warming pollution.

"We believe that continued reliance on an 'all-of-the-above' energy strategy would be fundamentally at odds with your goal of cutting carbon pollution," the environmentalists wrote in a letter to Obama this month.

The plea from some of his staunchest supporters did not stop Obama, who proclaimed in his State of the Union address Tuesday that his energy strategy is working.

"Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet," said Obama, who also declared that "climate change is a fact."

The dispute between Obama and the leaders of major green groups has been simmering for months, a schism that shows the fine line the environmental community has walked with a Democratic president who has taken significant steps on climate change and the recalcitrance of Obama's White House when it is criticized, even by its allies.

White House officials knew last spring that a letter objecting to Obama's energy policy was in the works. They urged the environmental groups to wait until after Obama delivered a speech on climate change in June, hoping his aggressive steps on global warming would change their minds.

"There is a cognitive dissonance inside the administration," Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We believe their commitment to fight climate change is genuine, and yet the energy policy goals of the administration make addressing climate change much more difficult."

The environmental groups' stance could be dismissed as advocacy groups just doing what they do — pushing the president to go further on an issue important to their members. Already, they have protested a pipeline project carrying Canadian tar sands oil into the U.S., fought to shutter coal-fired power plants and opposed the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.

But for the major groups, the letter marked new territory, the first time the lobby has been both united and sharply critical of Obama's central environmental issue, one they support in principle: curbing climate change.

"Not a lot of these groups have said it aloud. It does mark a shift in environmental community," said Maura Cowley, executive director of the Energy Action Coalition, who signed the letter.

That shift was clear in the reaction to Obama's State of the Union. Groups that had viewed the June climate speech positively pointed out what they saw as a flaw in logic in the president's remarks Tuesday night.

"An 'all-of-the-above energy strategy' cannot work for the president's own climate action plan and the climate vision he espoused," said Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, who also signed the letter. "We should not be locking ourselves into fossil fuel dependence that doesn't pass the president's own climate test."

The idea to take on Obama's all-of-the-above energy strategy began to take shape at a retreat in upstate New York in May. As the groups privately pressed the White House to adjust its policy, White House officials pushed them to hold off on the letter until after the climate speech.

The letter was sent Jan. 16.

The White House objected to its substance, arguing that it is possible to control emissions even as fossil fuel production climbs.

John Podesta, an Obama senior adviser, wrote that he was "surprised" the groups moved forward with the letter, especially since the White House has had to fend off repeated attacks from Republicans and the fossil fuel industry on its environmental policies.

No one in the environmental community is knocking what Obama has achieved. He has secured deals to double the fuel economy for cars and trucks, greatly expanded renewable energies such as wind and solar power and has proposed the first limits on carbon dioxide pollution from future coal-fired power plants.

This summer, the Obama administration is expected to take on the largest source of carbon dioxide pollution by proposing limits for existing coal-fired power plants.

Yet, at the same time, the number of rigs drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico has returned to levels not seen since the BP oil spill. Oil production and natural gas production are booming, largely on private lands where the administration has little control, and as a result so is the heat-trapping pollution from those operations. While U.S. greenhouse gas emissions declined 4.5 percent overall from 2011 to 2012, thanks in part to a switch from coal to natural gas for electricity production that was helped along by Obama, emissions from oil and gas production were up and second only to power plants when it comes to global warming.

Bill McKibben, a founder of 350.org and frequent critic of the administration's pro-fossil fuel strategies, said, "If you double the number of drilling rigs in the country and open up huge swaths of (public lands) to mining, and then you also put up some solar panels, it's like having a Weight Watchers brownie after you've eaten four pints of Ben and Jerry's." McKibben did not sign the letter.

"They know they are doing more than previous administrations, and we know that too," said David Yarnold, president and CEO of the National Audubon Society, one of the environmental groups that signed the letter. "They aren't doing what the moment requires, and they know that too."